the deep moans round with many voices

Apropos of nothing in particular:

So I was reading a fic yesterday (which I will not be naming or linking to, because it's relevant only as the spark of this ramble) in which (as a minor backstory point) two skilled hackers essentially steal an apartment by making it vanish off all electronic records so they won't have to pay rent.

Something struck me a little weird about that, but the sense of wrongness didn't crystallize until later on, when the hackers get into more serious crimes and one tells the other to stop bringing one-night stands back to where they have evidence lying around. Because they don't want to get found out.

The thing is, they would have been found out LONG before that. You flat out CANNOT make an apartment vanish that way. Not if the rental company/property management company is remotely on top of things.

Like, okay, you disappear an apartment off electronic records. You steal electricity and whatever other utilities you require. There are still people who know the unit is physically there. If the rental company keeps paper records, they REALLY know it's there. There are going to be paper floor plans and architectural diagrams floating around. And sooner or later somebody is going to notice that they don't have a lease or a tenant listed for Unit X, and also that Unit X has vanished from their electronic records, which is a big red flag that something fishy is going on. This will likely take one year maximum, given that apartments tend to rent on one-year leases (which then have to be manually extended/renewed each year).

Some buildings have regular preventative extermination treatments, and in those cases the exterminator will go to every unit; that doesn't rely on electronic records. The exterminator will have a master key and will see all your criminal paraphernalia, and if they're remotely competent will report that to the rental company or property management company. And if you change your lock so the master key won't work? That gets reported even faster.

You're also going to have trouble if there are general maintenance projects, like a burst water pipe or a problem with the heating pipes/vents. It doesn't matter how well you maintain your own apartment -- you can't control what other tenants do in their spaces, and believe me, somebody will break something major sooner or later. Then maintenance will have to notify the tenants that they're coming in to do Project Y, and if nobody has a record of the tenants in Unit X? That's a problem. If maintenance can't work the lock? That's a problem. And so on.

If you want to disappear a property, you're much better off with something you own in full rather than something you rent. And not a condo, either -- then you'd be stuck with the condo association, which is just as nosy as a rental company or property management company. You want a freestanding house. This of course means you'll have to fuck around with tax rolls, and probably intercept tax assessments now and then, but that's much less of an ongoing problem than trying to Jedi mind trick a whole rental company.

But really, you don't want to make the apartment vanish. If you're going to steal an apartment, what you want to do is lease it as a perfectly normal tenant (possibly under a fake ID) and then pay your rent promptly and in full with money you've stolen from somewhere else. Much simpler and less stressful! And if you want to be all "yay computers!" about the thing, you can do leases entirely by email these days, and pay electronically; most rental companies are quite happy to facilitate that sort of thing.

...

I think too much about logistics sometimes.

Also, it's a lot easier to suspend disbelief over things I am unfamiliar with, as you can tell by the fact that I'm writing this post now instead of several years ago, when I first read the fic in question, but had not yet started working for a rental company. *wry*

Augh. I think the 7/28 Homestuck update broke me.

*sobs helplessly over stupid alien teenagers*

( more serious thoughts -- beware of spoilers! )

...

I'm going to read Terezi's monologue and watch the flash and cry again now. *grabs box of tissues in preparation*

I saw Mad Max: Fury Road yesterday, and intend to go see it again on Thursday or Friday.

It's not objectively the greatest movie, I think? I mean, it's a damn good action movie! It's basically a two-hour car chase scene with occasional pauses for breath, punctuated by intense fights and explosions; the characterization and world-building is done mostly through background visuals, body language, and implication. But you know, it's not aiming to be anything other than a damn good action movie. Which is cool. The world can always use more damn good action movies if you ask me. :-)

As for why people are saying it's great and deep and important...

Um. How to phrase this?

Okay. The thing is, I love action movies. I love action movies A LOT. I am so there for chases and fights and guns and knives and explosions and the rules of physics and biology being overwritten in the service of "Dude, wouldn't it be cool if?" propositions.

But with almost every action movie in the world, there's a little niggling sense of, "Yes, but..." in the back of my mind.

"Yes, but where are the women?"

Where are the women among the heroes? Where are the women with speaking roles? Where are the women in crowd scenes? Where are the women in the backgrounds of organizations? Where are the women just getting on with their lives? Where are the women who have any contact with other women?

With Fury Road, I didn't have to ask that question, because THE WOMEN WERE RIGHT THERE ON-SCREEN. I'd say about a dozen with speaking roles, and they had their own arcs and their own goals and they talked to each other, and they didn't exist to glorify the male characters or to serve as sexy inspiration (whether living or dead). Some of them were traditionally action-movie badass (with guns and fists and cars and whatever), and some were not, and that's okay because there were enough women on-screen that no single character had to bear the burden of representing ALL women. They could just be themselves, who they would logically be in their positions. Some were young and gorgeous, some were middle-aged, some were old, and they were all treated LIKE PEOPLE, not sexy lamps or dumb jokes or burdens -- just like men always get to be treated.

So it's not that Fury Road is a great movie with a deep message. It's just that for once, it's a movie in a genre I love that doesn't punch me in the face with one hand even as it clasps the other and takes my money. Instead, this movie pulls me in for a hug and says, "Welcome home."

I love it so much for that.

(And I think I am retroactively even more annoyed about all those past face-punches than I was at the time. Dammit, people, PUT WOMEN IN YOUR MOVIES. Do you see how easy it is to do? Do you see how it doesn't spoil the adrenaline rush at all?? Do you see how you don't have to invent contrived romantic subplots to "justify" putting in a single woman as a narratively useless love interest??? Do you see how much money I am willing to give you in return???? ARGH!)

Generally speaking, I think movies made from books are never as good as the original material. The Silence of the Lambs has not joined my short list of exceptions.

This is not to say that it's a bad movie! No, it's a very good movie. It deserved that Oscar. But the book is better.

( Obviously the case had to be streamlined, which was by and large done sensibly... )

But really, Clarice Starling is the heart of the story; it lives and dies with her characterization. I miss seeing her do technical forensic work, and I miss seeing her consciously decide that she's willing to flunk out of Quantico rather than abandon Catherine Martin and the case, but aside from the sexist warping of the basement scene at the end, she makes it largely intact from book to screenplay and Jodie Foster brings her convincingly to life.

So yeah. A good movie. Still not as good as the book, but a very good movie. I'm glad I watched it. :D

-----

(For the record, the two movies that I think are better than their source books are The Princess Bride and Mysterious Skin. There are probably also some movies that are better than their source short stories, but while those face the problem of translating from one medium to another, they don't have the problem of how to tell the same story while chopping at least half of it out.)

Since I was a very small child, I have had a habit of making up... not quite stories, but sort of story scenarios -- a bunch of character sketches, some world-building, some basic plot overview, a few semi-detailed episodes -- and telling them to myself as I fall asleep, or walk to work, or take a shower, or any other time I have twenty minutes to kill and nothing at hand to read and no proper story I am driven to write. They are always deeply, deeply self-indulgent and generally the sort of thing that's not readily workable as a proper story since they're extremely diffuse and often self-contradictory, because what they are designed to do is hit as many of my kinks (narrative, character, world-building, and sexual) at once as possible, and to hell with coherence if it gets in the way of a particular juicy button.

When I was six, I had a running fantasy about kid superheroes with origin stories ranging from "just born that way" to "it's magic" to "the magic character gave him powers via mosquito bites." (Yes, mosquito bites. No, I don't know what I was thinking either.) From about eight to eleven, it was a thing about an enchantress in a tiny fairy-tale kingdom, which leaned heavily toward elaborate imaginary cartography and genealogy rather than any actual narrative. Around twelve or thirteen, my fantasies took a dramatic turn for the sexual and also started incorporating a bunch of elements cribbed from X-Men comics and Andre Norton. I didn't keep up the habit extensively in high school for whatever reason, but in college I had a few that were probably best understood as expressions of my slow-motion spiritual crisis, because they all had heavy religious elements and a distinct undertone of "but what does it all mean???" -- filtered through elaborate no-water or all-water secondary world fantasy settings, reincarnation, linguistics, and sword fights, of course, because I love a good sword fight. :-)

I still create that type of fantasy and invest a lot of time and mental/emotional energy into them, which is perhaps one contributing factor to my periodic bouts of not-writing -- my imagination is tied up elsewhere for a while and all the metaphorical phone lines are busy.

I sometimes wonder if I should try to shake those fantasies into writable form, because there are some really interesting ideas tied up in them... and then I get the screaming heebie-jeebies, because they are basically a window into my rawest id and while it may look like I am willing to spill my guts all over the internet, there are actually quite a lot of things I would prefer not to be showing the entire world. Or at least not without a fair bit more clothing and some pretense at structure and theme. Then again, id writing hits a hell of an emotional live wire when you get it right, and it's not like I haven't written some other stories that are basically raw id all over the wall ("Knives" is probably the best example), so...

Eh. I dunno. But I have been way heavy into a particular fantasy lately that started as a sci-fi Homestuck AU and has been gradually accreting more and more kinks and id fragments as I play with it (and has shed a couple others, because I do occasionally pretend at coherent world-building), and sometimes the best way to get an obsession out of my head and free up my brain for other tasks is to share it.

Maybe I will try writing it up this week. :-)